Amy Walter:
Yes.
So I do think we have to be careful in the wording sometimes of polling. And what I also like to do is go back and look at time series of polls. So CNN came out with their poll asking a similar question, but phrasing it maybe a little bit differently, basically just saying, do you approve or disapprove of the way that they’re handling the transition?
And they have these numbers going all the way back to Bill Clinton in 1992. A couple of things that you can see. The first is his approval of how he’s handling it is much lower than any other president who has come in their first term. Now, this is odd because it’s his first term. It’s not his first term, right? So non-consecutive terms, we don’t have any history with that.
So we have seen people like, for example, Barack Obama coming in with an approval in the 80s in terms of how he’s handling his transition. What is different, though, from the first Trump, Trump 1.0, is that he’s getting much higher marks this time around. So, right after the election in 2017, he was only getting 46 percent approving. By the time we got to January, only 40 percent approved. Right now, he’s at 55 percent approved, 45 percent disapprove.
And I think a lot of it is based on what Tam just said, which is it feels very normal. It didn’t feel normal in 2017. Nothing was normal in 2017. So the sort of rolling this out, it looks very familiar.
And I also think Tam’s exactly right, is that, while there seems to be some cushion here for Donald Trump and the focus has been all on Republicans, who’s going to say yes, are these folks going to get through, I think we have to remember that we have no idea how voters are going to react once they see these people themselves, once Democrats — remember, right now, they’re just meeting with the Republicans — when Democrats get to ask questions too.
And the response of voters to like, oh, I didn’t — huh, I didn’t really know about a lot of this. That’s going to be critically important.
